5 Cultural Suggestions: Cláudia Varejão
Once a week, UMBIGO invites one person to share their 5 cultural suggestions. What can we do at home? From a book to a podcast, album or film: here are recommendations from artists, curators, gallery owners, cultural activists, friends.
We will share the recipe for what makes us better, and we remain united and positive.
Umbigo has been publishing this section since the beginning of the pandemic.
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Cinema
Women Make Film
Mark Cousins
2019
Women Make Film by Mark Cousins, distributed by Dogwoof Ldt. It is 14 hours of cinema, based on over 1000 film excerpts that portray the work of women directors over 13 decades on 5 continents. Narrated by Tilda Swinton, Jane Fonda, Adjoa Andoh, Thandie Newton, Sharmila Tagora and Debra Winger.
Essays/Chronicles
Gargantas Soltas
Paulo Pires do Vale
Gerador
Paulo Pires do Vale texts by the essayist, philosopher, professor, curator and commissioner of the National Arts Plan for the online magazine Gerador. They are remarkable pieces, prompting us to look at life and realize that Everything is Something Else. [Portuguese only]
Radio
Radio Garden is a Dutch non-profit radio and digital research project, developed between 2013 and 2016, by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the Transnational Radio Knowledge Platform and 5 other European universities. It allows access to thousands of radios worldwide through a direct search on the globe.
Podcast
Vinte Mil Léguas – O Podcast de Ciências e Livros is a podcast that reads scientists as if they were writers. In this first season, we have access to Charles Darwin’s universe through what he lived, the authors he read and what influenced the life of the author of The Origin of Species. It is written and narrated by Leda Cartum and Sofia Nestrovski. [Portuguese only]
Book
Auschwitz and After
Charlotte Delbo
Yale University Press
1995
Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo, translated and distributed by Yale University Press. How to go on living if the body remembers blows, hunger, thirst, fear and contempt? Charlotte Delbo kept moving forward and with, the memory(s), she wrote demanding and lyrical, beautiful and striking books, such as the three from Auschwitz and After.
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Cláudia Varejão was born in Oporto and studied film directing at the Gulbenkian Creativity and Artistic Creation Programme, in partnership with the German Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin and the International Film Academy of São Paulo. She also studied photography at AR.CO Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual in Lisbon. She is the author of the trilogy of short films Fim-de-semana, Um dia Frio and Luz da Manhã. Ama-San, about Japanese female divers, was her feature film debut, receiving dozens of awards around the world. This was followed by No Escuro Do Cinema Descalço Os Sapatos, a film that follows the intimacy of a group of dancers from a dance company. Amor Fati is her most recent film, due for release in 2020, and Lobo e Cão, in production, will make her tackle fiction yet again. Her films have been selected and awarded by the most prestigious film festivals, including Locarno, Rotterdam, Visions du Reel, Cinema du Reel, Karlovy Vary, Art of the real – Lincoln Center, among many others. Alongside her work as a director, she has a background as a photographer and is a guest lecturer at AR.CO and the Catholic University of Porto. Her work, both in film and photography, documentary or fiction, has a very close relationship with the people portrayed.